Tag Archives: Aeon

“Now’s the Time,” Eric Olson
“If I were to die today, my loved ones would be grief-stricken, my son would be orphaned, and my colleagues would have to mark my students’ exams. That would be terrible for them.”

“Note To Self,” Elaine Blair
“To throw in our lot with the essay — to place it at the center of our literary culture — is to accept the idea of a more or less continuous self that can make its observations, emotions, interpretations, and opinions intelligible to others.”

“On the Road,” James McWilliams
“The trade-off for submitting voluntarily to the pain of a marathon—which really can be otherworldly—is the opportunity to transcend your anger, to step outside normal life and build a unique narrative out of a sanctioned act of rebellion.”

“Romantic Regimes,” Polina Aronson
“In the Regime of Choice, the no-man’s land of love—that minefield of unreturned calls, ambiguous emails, erased dating profiles and awkward silences—must be minimised. No more pondering ‘what if’ and ‘why’. No more tears. No more sweaty palms. No more suicides.”

“Welles Lettres,” A. S. Hamrah
“It’s been difficult to get beyond the mocking portrayals of Welles in part because so many critics and pop film historians have adopted Hollywood’s conformist notions of success. Welles’s story of uncompromising ambition and lack of concern for studio approval has functioned as a cautionary tale: a lesson in how not to succeed in show business.”

“Rembrandt,” John Berger
“Just outside Amsterdam there lives an old, well-known, and respected Dutch painter. He has worked hard throughout his life—but he has only produced, as far as the world knows, a few drawings and one large canvas which is in the National Museum. I went to see his second major work, a triptych of the war. We spoke of war, old age, the vocation of the painter. He opened the door of his studio to let me go in first. The huge canvases were white. After years of work he had that day calmly destroyed them.”

“Evolution in the Classroom,” Jeff Guhin
“None of the creationists I worked with disliked science. Recently, I did fieldwork in two Sunni Muslim and two Evangelical Christian high schools in the New York City area, and while the majority in all four schools distrusted evolution, not a one disliked science, or even blamed it.”

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“Down the Rabbit Hole,” Evan Kindley
“What makes a good annotator? It’s some combination, apparently, of excess and restraint: an instinct for when to tell us more than we need to know (or more than we knew there was to know) balanced with a refusal to bore us.”

“The Magic of Untidiness,” Laurel Berger
“Renewal is what we do each time we revisit a book. It’s not only the text that holds meaning, but the thing itself and the imprint that time and lived experience have left on it.”

“The Pamphleteers,” Scott Porch and Gordon Wood
“The pamphlets are hard to read. There are too many citations to Cicero and Tacitus, and there’s a very limited audience for that. To some extent, that’s true today. People who read The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and Atlantic Monthly are the same people.”

“Broken Links,” Alana Massey
“I asked Michael L Nelson, a computer scientist at Old Dominion University in Virginia, how likely it is that someone, or something, could follow my trail back to find the comments and profiles I’d flung across the internet in the 1990s and early 2000s.”

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“Selling Out the Newspaper Comic Strip,” Luke Epplin
“Calvin and Hobbes, which centered on a headstrong child and a stuffed tiger that comes to life under his gaze, shared many similarities with Peanuts: articulate children, fantasy sequences, episodic storylines, philosophical undercurrents, and an aversion to facile punch lines. But Schulz and Watterson harbored fundamental disagreements about the nature and direction of their medium, and their entrenched beliefs shaped their divergent approaches to comics as both an art and a business.”

“Melancholy,” Carina del Valle Schorske
“Melancholy is a word that has fallen out of favor for describing the condition we now call depression. The fact that our language has changed, without the earlier word disappearing completely, indicates that we are still able to make use of both.”

“The Riders of the Waves,” Alice Gregory
“Reputations are made and maintained in the ocean, but they’re premised on more than just talent. Seniority, humility, pain tolerance, and a hundred other factors contribute to a surfer’s local eminence.”

“The Genealogy of Orals,” Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
“When someone from abroad wants to learn about our university system, his first pressing question is: How do your students participate in university life? We answer: By means of the ear — they take part as listeners. The foreigner is amazed and asks: Purely by listening? Purely by listening, we repeat.”
(excerpted from Anti-Education, a volume of Nietzsche’s lectures edited by Chad Wellmon)

“Digital Star Chamber,” Frank Pasquale
“For wines or films, the stakes are not terribly high. But when algorithms start affecting critical opportunities for employment, career advancement, health, credit and education, they deserve more scrutiny.”

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“Universities, Mismanagement, and Permanent Crisis,” Gerry Canavan
“As every college administration invokes generalized, free-flowing “emergency” as its justification for arbitrary policy after arbitrary policy — all of which need to be implemented now, en toto and without debate, even the ones that contradict the other ones — they are arguing that their management up to now has been so wildly and irredeemably poor that the university has been thrown into total system crisis. And yet the solution to the emergency is, inevitably, always more (and more draconian) administrative control, always centralized under the very same people who took us over the cliff in the first place!”

“Dark Leviathan,” Henry Farrell
“The libertarian dream of free online drug markets that can magically and peacefully regulate themselves is just that: a dream. Playing at pirates is only fun as long as the other players are kids too. The trouble is, once adults with real swords appear, it may be too late to wake up.”

“The Allure of Hyperlocal History,” Casey N. Cep
“Arcadia certainly occupies a small niche in the publishing world, but it’s a comfortable one, one that resonates with the full meaning of that word, offering rare nests in a time of endless migration.”

“The Failure of Macho Christianity,” Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig
“For both PUAs and the hyper-masculine ministry of Mars Hill and its like-minded flankers, the story goes something like this: feminism and its attendant ideological shifts have undermined traditionally male sources of power and dignity; nevertheless, certain anthropological realities (divinely ordained gender differences for the Christians, evolutionary psychology for the PUAs) resist this newly imposed order.”

Hedgehogs abroad:

“Revival—Elmer Gantry Returns!,” Leann Davis Alspaugh
“Oral Roberts is said to have burst through his front door one day, shouting ‘Fix me a steak, I’ve just seen Jesus!’ The charismatic televangelist, who died in 2009, had an appetite for fiery sermons and faith healings, but it was his reliance on the collection plate that really aggravated his critics.”

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“Can We Criticize Foucault?,” Daniel Zamora
“Foucault was highly attracted to economic liberalism: he saw in it the possibility of a form of governmentality that was much less normative and authoritarian than the socialist and communist left, which he saw as totally obsolete.”

“The Disappearance of Rosemary Tonks,” Ruth Graham
“Decades later, a London poet named Rosemary Tonks would name Rimbaud as one of her main influences. If she was not quite the scandalous sensation of her forebear, she was nonetheless respected, and she ran with a bohemian crowd.… And then, quite suddenly, she disappeared.”

“Good Feminist,” Vivian Gornick
“Fast-forward another twenty-five years, and we’re into what’s called Third Wave feminism—a non-movement movement whose participants seem to bear an uncanny resemblance to the young women who called themselves free women in the 1920s.”

“Future Perfect,” Iwan Rhys Morus
“For the Victorians, the future, as terra incognita, was ripe for exploration (and colonisation). For someone like me—who grew up reading the science fiction of Robert Heinlein and watching Star Trek—this makes looking at how the Victorians imagined us today just as interesting as looking at the way our imagined futures work now.”

“Who Killed Cat Fancy?,” Abraham Riesman
“Extensive interviews with writers and executives there have suggested an answer: Cat lovers killed Cat Fancy. In their defense, they had no idea they were doing it.”

“Who Should Own the Internet?,” Julian Assange
“Unlike intelligence agencies, which eavesdrop on international telecommunications lines, the commercial surveillance complex lures billions of human beings with the promise of “free services.” Their business model is the industrial destruction of privacy. And yet even the more strident critics of NSA surveillance do not appear to be calling for an end to Google and Facebook.”

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The Hedgehog Review is an intellectual journal concerned with contemporary cultural change published three times per year by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.